Subj : How to get paid to use my many programming skills? (was: Free Oracle) To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : rem642b Date : Sat Sep 10 2005 12:57 pm (Note: I'm still available for work programming, such as Lisp or Java.) > From: Duane Bozarth > I think you need to figure out how to use what you were trained in. I was never trained in anything. I mostly just learned things on my own, by practicing with whatever facilities were available (IBM 1620 + card reader with Fortran With Format and SPS, IBM 360/50h + card reader with Fortran IV and Watfor, IBM 1130 + card reader with Fortran IV, PDP-10 + III terminals (and later also DataDisk terminals) with SAIL, FAIL, and Stanford Lisp 1.6 (and later also ILISP = UCI-LISP), PDP-10 via ArpaNet/AmesTIP with MacLisp and MacSyma, IBM 370 + Wylbur with Fortran IV and WatFiv, PDP-10 with MainSail, PDP-10 with SL and PSL, Macintosh Plus with HyperCard and Pocket Forth and Sesame C and Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp, Unix shells via VT100 dialup with GNU C and CMUCL and J2SE and lots of other programming languages, Linux laptop with J2EE I installed myself and GNU Emacs Lisp and BeanShell. Generally I consulted reference manuals, and more recently Web-accessible tutorials. Once in a long while somebody coached me a little, such as when somebody suggested I try SAIL instead of the cruddy Fortran they had, and when Hans Moravec told me how R.E.P. works, and when somebody told me about the existance of MacSyma at MIT-ML accessible via the ArpaNet. More recently I've occasionally gotten stuck and asked for help on a newsgroup and gotten a useful answer, such as when I was stuck trying to get PHP to work, and somebody told me about .htaccess which I needed to set up to enable PHP, after which I could then proceed to learn PHP from online documentation without any further human help. The recent classes I took (Visual Basic, Java, C++) weren't training, they were just lecture plus homework assignments I had to do all by myself (except for two group projects we were assigned, and a couple times I needed extra help from the instructor, first what driver and URL needed to use any RDBMS on the campus machine, which turned out to be MicroSoft ACCESS via ODBC, after instructor tried to download and install MySql and a couple others only to find that none of them would work there due to various firewall protection and lack of root access, and second which version of J2EE to install on my laptop which already had J2SE 1.3.1 on it, and the answer was 1.3.1 instead of 1.4 as originally instructed by syllabus, because only 1.3.1 would work correctly with J2SE 1.3.1 already on my laptop; Note that my instructor didn't know about CloudScape/Derby which was already included in the J2EE that I had already downloaded at that point. I discovered that by accident while researching Google, and checked and found indeed it was already on my machine and worked just fine.). So given the many skills I learned on my own, none of which are sufficient for any jobs I've seen advertised any time in the past ten years, I have no idea what jobs you meant by the remark I quoted above. I already know how to use what I've taught myself. I just don't know how to get paid for any of that use. So assuming you meant to say: >>I think you need to figure out how to get paid to use what you taught yourself. I have no idea how to do what you say. Please suggest how. .